Vehicles can have seats, seat assemblies, or seat structures (hereinafter referred to as seating systems) adapted to address physical immobility or other issues with drivers and passengers. Commonly, such a seating system is adapted to move the seat between a drive position in which the seat faces forward inside the vehicle and an access position in which the seat has rotated and is facing out of the vehicle door opening.
For the immobilized person for whom a seating system of this kind is intended the wheelchair is the natural choice of transportation to and from the vehicle. In further making it easier to transfer the immobilized person from the wheelchair to the vehicle seat it is known to have a wheelchair, in which the seat can be separated from wheel frame and transferred to the seating system inside the vehicle. Thus the immobilized person can remain seated on the same seat during the entire transport, whether the seat makes up a wheelchair or a seat of a seating system in a vehicle.
A combined wheelchair and vehicle seat provides challenges in particular when it comes to the design of the brake system for the wheelchair. For example, the published Japanese patent application no. JP 2003 265536 A discloses a wheelchair wherein the seat can be separated from the wheel frame and a brake system for such a wheelchair. However, previous systems are limited in several ways. With a caregiver responsible for pushing the wheelchair with the immobilized person seated, a wheelchair brake system has to be provided that enables the caregiver to brake efficiently and safely. The brake system has to provide for an effective, smooth braking. At the same time, as the seat is separated from the wheel frame, the brake system will have to be separable into a seat system, and a wheel frame system. Thus, an efficient transmission mechanism of the brake force between the two systems is desirable. A further challenge is that the features of the wheelchair brake assembly may have to be adapted not to interfere with the crashworthiness of the seat when the seat is in the drive position inside the vehicle. Hence, there is a desire to address the above mentioned challenges and provide an improved wheelchair brake assembly that enables an easy attachment/detachment of the seat to and from a wheel frame, while at the same time enabling an efficient transmission of the brake force and a smooth braking of the wheelchair.